ON WRITING POEMS FACING INTO THE BROKEN WORLD
Kaveh Akbar and Jane Hirshfield have been in a running e-mail conversation since January 2016, when Akbar first contacted Hirshfield about doing an interview in his Divedapper series, before his first, widely acclaimed book, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, 2017), swept him into the constellation of contemporary poets. This excerpt from that ongoing, now years-long dialogue was created for American Poetry Review in conjunction with the publication of Hirshfield’s ninth book of poetry, Ledger, published by Knopf in March 2020.
KAVEH AKBAR So much of your new book, Ledger, and your work at large, seems to be orbiting a nucleus of bewilderment—bewilderment at trees, falcons, history, language, yes, but also bewilderment at our “little souls,” bewilderment at humanity’s capacity for cruelty to each other despite our overwhelming similarities, or at our capacity for inaction (or for doing, as one poem names it, “not-enough”) despite the omnipresent existential threat of a dying earth. I wonder if you might talk about bewilderment, what you believe it can (and can’t) do for us?
JANE HIRSHFIELD Thank you, Kaveh, both for the newest of your always-astounding poems and for starting us off with such an interesting question.
Ledger carries that title because it’s a book of stocktaking, trying to take account of and recount what feels an unaccountable time. Here we all are, trying to comprehend a precipitously incomprehensible era. These poems navigate my responses and responsibilities, as poet, as person, to that era. How could anyone not be bewildered amid what feels a kind of insanity? Rachel Carson wrote of the melting Arctic ice seventy years ago, in her first, 1949 book. It’s incomprehensible to me that we still haven’t taken any global, substantial, collaborative action. It’s incomprehensible to me that we continue to kill one another over symbolic differences, that compassion, interconnection, and the worldview of science can be so willfully trampled by the hungry-ghost wish for power and its material trappings.
“How did this happen? What have we come to?” is a line that appears early on in the book. To question, and not only assert, has long been a part of my practice, as a person and as a poet. In the aftermath of September 11, I wrote a poem titled “Against Certainty.” Others from that time question judgment and opinion. I want to be skeptical of my own first sureness. I want to write poems that lead me to look harder, with greater subtlety and more generosity of imagination and heart. Certainty closes off possibilities, complacency puts us to sleep, hard-set opinions and quick conclusions blind us to further looking. Uncertainty and doubt feel to me better. What you already